Tag Archives: powershell

At FundApps we run a regular SkipFish scan against our application as one of our tools for monitoring for security vulnerabilities. In order for it to test beyond our login page, we need to provide a valid .ASPXAUTH cookie (you’ve renamed it, right?) to the tool.

Because we want to prevent Cross-site request forgeries to our login pages, we’re using the AntiForgeryToken support in MVC. This means we can’t just post our credentials to the login url and fetch the cookie that is returned. So here’s the script we use to fetch a valid authentication cookie before we call SkipFish with its command line arguments:

Getting commands and parameters in Powershell and Psake can be pretty troublesome at times. The echoargs helper from the PowerShell Community Extensions can be a lifesaver. If, for instance, you are calling

msbuild.exe /t:Build /p:SomeTroublesomeParametersHere

if you swap msbuild for echoargs (after placing the extensions in C:\Windows\System32\WindowsPowerShell\v1.0\Modules and calling Import-Module pscx), then you’ll see the exact parameters being passed to the executable:

Arg 0 is </t:Build>
Arg 1 is </p:SomeTroublesomeParametersHere>

However, to make it easier for those dipping into our build scripts, I decided to create a wrapper function so that we would always output parameters to the external functions we call to the console for debugging purposes.

and you’ll get some helpful debug information over how the parameters were actually passed. The only nifty bit in the function is that it uses the first parameter as the command name, and then passes all remaining arguments on to the executed command.